A Publishing Phenomenon and Its Critics

The Secret sold more than thirty million copies in over fifty languages, spent 190 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and, boosted by Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of the film and book on her television show, had generated an estimated 300 million dollars in combined sales by 2009. It remains one of the best selling self-help works of the twenty-first century.

Its reception among scientists and clinicians has been considerably less favorable. Writing in the New York Times, the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons singled out the book's invocations of quantum physics as a mechanism for thought affecting matter, and the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall likewise rejected its use of physics as unsupported by the science it names. The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009), placed The Secret within a broader critique of the positive thinking industry, arguing that books in its genre encourage political and personal complacency by treating unwanted circumstances, including illness, as failures of a person's own thinking rather than as outcomes with causes outside anyone's control. Clinicians have specifically criticized the implication, drawn out in the book's own discussion of illness, that patients bear responsibility for conditions such as cancer through insufficiently positive thought, a claim with no support in medical evidence and one capable of adding guilt to an already difficult diagnosis.